The Sanitation Czar of Mosul

Mosul’s Old City

When Osama bin Laden masterminded the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 from his command post in Afghanistan, and George W. Bush decided to retaliate by attacking Iraq and removing from power Saddam Hussein, who had precisely nothing to do with the al Qaeda attack on 9/11, I was 56 years old and approaching the end of my physical ability to travel to a war zone and get close enough to the action to write about it.    

I was able to get in touch with enough of my old contacts in the Army and the Pentagon to secure for myself an “embed” with a front line unit in Iraq, and so burdened by an absurdly large and overloaded backpack, I began my trip by air from Los Angeles, California to Kuwait City, Kuwait, where I would be met by an acquaintance from West Point who was serving as a lieutenant colonel with a National Guard Civil Affairs battalion from New Jersey.  He and his battalion had concluded their assignment in Iraq by November of 2003 and were stationed in Kuwait, but with his contacts, he could get me flown into Iraq on a C-130 transport aircraft and picked up at Baghdad International Airport (BIAP) by another Civil Affairs battalion and taken to the Public Affairs headquarters for the war in Baghdad where I would be shipped off to what was referred to as a “line unit” with the 101^st Airborne Division (Airmobile) in Mosul, where I could complete my “embed” and cover the war.

I flew into BIAP in the middle of the night and found an accommodation on the 8^th floor of one of Saddam’s airport administration buildings.  Exhausted, I put down my overloaded backpack and the helmet and bulletproof vest I had borrowed in Kuwait and fell asleep on an unadorned cot.  I woke up around 8 the next morning, rubbed my red, itchy eyes, and looked out the window.  From the 8^th floor, I could see for what seemed like miles, and every single mile of what I saw was covered by a U.S. military base camp:  endless rows of platoon-size tents, and at the end of each row, a U.S. Army temporary latrine facility; a massive DFAC, or Army dining facility, housed in a gigantic tent-like structure that had to be the side of a football field; dozens of rows of cargo containers holding supplies of food, equipment, ammunition and all the rest of the stuff armies need to fight wars; and in the distance, row upon row of tanks, armored personnel carriers, bulldozers, earthmovers, backhoes, cranes, front loaders – enough olive-drab painted construction equipment to build a city.

Looking out at this display of American military might, I said to the first lieutenant who had traveled from Kuwait with me, “That looks like Vietnam out there.”  “Yup,” he answered.  “That means we’re fucked, right?” I asked.  “Yup,” he answered.

After a day of dealing with Defense Department PR hacks in Baghdad, I joined a convoy out to BIAP and hopped a Blackhawk helicopter flight into Mosul where I would be dropped off at the headquarters of the 101^st and sent out to a front line infantry company the next day.  When I went through the gates into the heavily defended company basecamp at the edge of Mosul’s Old City, there stood a simple brick three story building.  I had to walk right past a huge pit in the ground where a fire smoldered to get to the swinging glass doors of the building’s entrance.  Glancing down into the pit, I saw all manner of burning detritus – old office furniture, plastic containers, food waste, plastic bags of trash…god only knows what.  The smell was incredible.  It made your eyes water.  I was escorted upstairs to the second floor to the room where I would be sleeping on a cot next to a first lieutenant serving as company executive officer.  The smell from what I learned was called their firepit was, if anything, worse.  I walked over and looked out the window.  The pit was directly below the room where I would spend the next three or four nights. 

The firepits located within every platoon, company, battalion, and brigade size basecamp in Iraq would turn out to be the Iraq war’s Agent Orange, causing the mysterious ailment now known, 20 years later, as “Iraq War Syndrome” and causing everything from emphysema, skin cancer, lung cancer, hair loss – you name it -- in the soldiers who spent weeks and months and eventually years walking past them, sleeping next to them, breathing their air.

Of course the military situation in and around Mosul and across the 101^st Airborne Division’s area of operations that was larger than the state of Connecticut was unnervingly similar to the situation faced by the U.S. military in Vietnam for 10 years:  The angry citizens of a hostile country invaded by the United States military were engaged in an active guerrilla war to expel the invaders.  As in Vietnam, the enemy was not in uniform.  You didn’t know which Iraqi civilian walking along a street was armed with a hidden AK-47 or carrying a grenade or wearing a suicide vest of explosives.  You didn’t know beneath which pile of bricks and wood from an exploded building was concealed an IED, an improvised explosive device, which might consist of an unexploded 155 mm artillery shell to which was affixed a detonator that could be set off by pressing the switch of a garage door opener.

Sixty to seventy of those IED’s either exploded or were disarmed every single day in Mosul, killing 101^st soldiers, civilians, or both.

The war in Iraq was a conflict between nations fought with the same weapons that were used in Vietnam:  M-16’s, 81 mm mortars, howitzers, 40 mm grenade launchers on the U.S. side; AK-47’s, 60 mm mortars, RPG-7 grenade launchers, and IED booby traps on the side of the Iraqi insurgents, as they became known.

There were also, of course, hearts and minds to be won.  Having “taken” Mosul and blown up a whole lot of stuff in the process, 101^st soldiers were almost immediately rebuilding what they had destroyed.  Paul Bremer, the Defense Department civilian sent to Iraq to head up what was euphemistically called the Coalition Provisional Authority, had made the genius decision to disband Iraq’s army and ban Saddam’s Baath Party.  Because the Baath Party ran everything in the country from the schools to the electrical grid to the water system to the local police to road repair crews to Mosul’s and Baghdad’s and every other Iraqi city’s sanitation department, all the people who ran those things were fired, leaving exactly no one in charge of anything necessary to run the country of Iraq.

So, it all had to be rebuilt:  new cops had to be hired, along with new teachers, new mailmen and postal workers, new Social Security administrators, new electrical and water and sewer workers, new school teachers…in fact, the old administration for every Iraqi city, town or village had to be replaced.

The 101^st, having destroyed everything in the first place, stepped in to rebuild things.  One of the biggest problems faced by the 101^st when they “took” Mosul was the garbage littering the streets, tons of it along the streets and roads in huge, stinking, rat infested piles.  The battalion area where I was embedded was charged with rebuilding Mosul’s sanitation system. A second lieutenant, less than a year out of college, was appointed Garbage Czar of Mosul.  I met him.  He was 21 years old and so fresh-faced and youthful, he had to shave only once every two or three days.

About a week into my stay with the company in downtown Mosul, I rode in a convoy over to a seized Saddam palace where the 101st Division Commander, Major General David Petraeus, had his headquarters. Petraeus, West Point class of 1974, having read my first novel, “Dress Gray,” was familiar with my name and acted delighted to see me.  Enormously proud of the accomplishments of the 101^st Airborne Division, he assured me that anywhere I wanted to go, anyone I wanted to talk to, anything I wanted to see, his division was open to me.  He told me I could stop by his headquarters anytime.  They had hot water and showers, and if I wanted to avail myself of this comparative luxury, I was welcome to do so.

So I took a shower and shaved and was walking past Petraeus’ office when I heard him call me by name.  He invited me to accompany him at his afternoon BUB, or Battle Update Briefing, a gathering of staff officers every day at 5 pm who reported on the status of the war in the 101^st area of operations.

I sat next to Petraeus in a large ballroom that had been converted into a theater of sorts, with a bank of large bleachers along one side of the room where staff officers sat in rows of desks with their laptops.  Petraeus and the assistant division commander sat at a table below the bleachers facing a large flat-screen TV which displayed charts and graphs and Power-point style narratives of each of the division sections – operations, intelligence, personnel, supply, transportation, and so forth.  I think it was the supply officer who eventually stood up and said that today’s presentation would be on the status of Mosul’s sanitation system.  The second lieutenant I had met had completely rebuilt the system:  he had hired new garbage truck drivers, who because they had not been in the Baath Party, didn’t have driver’s licenses, so they had to be taught to drive the garbage trucks.  Same with the guys who picked up and loaded the garbage.  New garbage routes had to be redrawn.  The supply officer put up a map of Mosul on the TV screen showing the red lines of the new garbage routes, dozens of them crisscrossing the city.  New administrators had to be hired to run the system.  The entire new sanitation department had to be paid with Iraqi currency seized from Saddam-run banks.

On and on the supply officer went.  Finally, his presentation was over, and a half an hour later, the BUB was over.  I was walking out of the huge Saddam palace ballroom when Petraeus turned to me and asked me what I thought.  When we got back to his office, I asked him if he had ever thought about the absurdity of invading a country and occupying a city the size of Mosul with its 2.5 million inhabitants and destroying everything they had built up and established only to have to rebuild a new, allegedly improved version of what was there before.  New teachers who had never taught a class; new cops who had never walked a beat or made an arrest; new garbage men who had never picked up a trashcan or driven a truck; new water system workers who had never turned on a pump; new sewer workers who had never been down a manhole.

You’ve rebuilt all this stuff and hired all these new non-Baath Party people.  It’s December.  Your division is scheduled to rotate back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in January.  What’s going to happen when you’re gone? I asked Petraeus.

He looked at me like I was an alien from another planet.  We’ve been given a job to do, and we’re doing it, he answered.  And we’re proud of our accomplishments. 

The 101^st Airborne Division lost about 100 soldiers while they were in Mosul.  An entire division of about 30,000 troops was replaced by a mechanized brigade of six-wheeled Stryker armored personnel carriers and the 7,000 or so soldiers who made up the brigade.  The U.S. military clung to its deteriorating presence in Northern Iraq, suffering more casualties for another three years, until in 2007 Petraeus was sent back to Iraq to command the “surge” of 20,000 more troops into Iraq, mostly in Baghadad, to “stabilize” the situation.  More units of the Iraqi army were trained and mobilized to take over the war against the Iraqi insurgency, so Iraqis in brand new uniforms could fight Iraqi insurgents in a kind of civil war imposed by the U.S. military.   

In June of 2014, fighters for ISIS, the Islamic State, invaded Mosul.  There were 30,000 Iraqi federal soldiers and another 30,000 U.S. trained federal police stationed in Mosul.  It took 1,500 ISIS fighters six days to oust 60,000 Iraqi soldiers and police from Mosul.  They destroyed much of the city, leaving the Old City where my embed company was located in ruins.  ISIS fighters executed about 4,000 Iraqi soldiers and federal police and left them in the largest mass grave in Iraqi history, the Khafsa Sinkhole.  It would take the Iraqi government two years, 2016 and 2017, to take Mosul back from ISIS. 

Since then, the United Nations has been rebuilding Mosul.  The European Union is sponsoring a campaign to rebuild the destroyed Old City of Mosul, contributing a budget of about $40 million to the U.N. budget of $105 million. They are still working on the project of returning Mosul to life as a city.

I don’t know what happened to the second lieutenant who rebuilt the sanitation system in Mosul in 2003, but I’m sure they could use the 101^st Airborne Division’s Sanitation Czar these 20 years later, because from the Assyrian and Akkadian Empires between 2030 and  2100 B.C. to the U.S invasion in 2003 to the civil war between Shias and Sunnis to the terrorist war of ISIS, wars have not been kind to either Iraq or Mosul.  Wars destroy cities and then they are rebuilt and destroyed and rebuilt again and again in the absurd and futile cycle of misery we call civilization.